Thoughts on software, programming, music, and education. And other stuff.

Monday, September 28, 2009

TortoiseSVN weirdness

I had tremendous difficulties today trying to connect to a svn+ssh repository on a Solaris server using TortoiseSVN on a Windows client. I kept getting error messages of the form "network connection closed unexpectedly" with no explanation. Fortunately, I was able to find a workaround (see below).

I think the problem was bash on the server: every non-interactive ssh login was printing error messages to stderr, and for whatever reason TortoisePlink (the ssh client included with Tortoise) could not deal with these. I am not absolutely certain that this explanation is correct, but here is my reasoning, based on trying various combinations of svn and ssh clients on Windows:

cygwin svn / cygwin ssh: worked fine (the error messages were visible, but ignored, and the svn operation worked)